Electronic components are subject to miniaturizing. Therefore, electronic components of these products need to be ever smaller and lighter. As a result, more and more integrated and high integrated circuits may be required.
Reducing the sizes of the masks and increasing the number of connection pins generated the need of new designs, such as pin grid arrays (PGA), ball grid arrays (BGA) and land grid arrays (LGA). The particulars of these designs are that they provide their connection pins throughout the whole array surface, rather than just on its periphery, as was the case with former designs.
In particular ball grid arrays and LGAs are subject to significant failures in electronic components. These failures which may be a consequence of a shock impacted from drop and fatigue from thermal and bending cycling also apply to any other type of packages, interconnections and connection types, such as soldering and gluing. The packages fail mainly due to failure in the interconnection between the component and the printed wiring board, in particular in the solder joints or in the printed wiring board (PWB) build-up.
The problems of failure due to shock impact increase even more in case of stacking of several dies on top of each other, and encapsulating these within one mold as the mold becomes thicker. However, stacking is one of the major trends in future electronic components.
The package design has a significant effect on the reliability of the integrated circuit, in particular in mobile device environments, where the devices are subject to dropping, bending and thermal cycling loads.